Page 117 - Art Review

Kati Heck Heimlich Manoeuvre

Sadie Coles HQ, Kingly Street, London 23 November – 10 February

German-born, Antwerp-based Kati Heck’s first painting, but modern art is also here in faint, What stops these devices from ending
show with Sadie Coles HQ centres on six large random historical echoes of the twentieth up as deconstructive whimsy is how they
paintings hung in a purpose-built enclosure century’s disenfranchised, also-ran history create a tension between narrative serious-
within the gallery’s main space. They’re based of figurative painting – Otto Dix, DDR socialist ness and delirium – Heck’s figures have
on Austrian composer Gustav Mahler’s 1911 realism, early Lucian Freud, Francis Picabia, the mien of friends and collaborators, with
six-part sung symphony Das Lied von der Erde postwar Surrealism filtered through prog- the look of those complicit in their being
(The Song of the Earth), itself a setting-to-music rock album-cover art… staged by the painter, whose painterly skill
of texts derived from Chinese poems of the Tang But Heck riddles her paintings with gives them shape as much as it threatens
dynasty (618–907 AD). The Song of the Earth is all bizarre malfunctions: the arm of the lute- their dissolution.
about the joys of life, of friendship, of drinking, wielding woman in the twilight forest This is painting as sociability, which Heck
music, youth and beauty, tempered by melan- of Der Abschied (The Farewell, all works 2017) does plenty of. In the adjoining space is a soft
cholic apprehensions of life’s transience and is rendered with pasty, chunky fleshiness, but sculpture, a whitish spiralling sausage-arm
the omnipotence of death. her hand disintegrates, letting the background with a fist, a support for a screen looping Der
Heck’s revisiting of this (maybe corny) pierce through. In the louche bacchanal springende Punkt case II: O – a psychedelic outing
romanticism, winding through the centuries, Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (Drinking Song of Heck’s alter ego Babydetektiv. Somewhere
produces these surreal, anarchic and weirdly of Earth’s Sorrow), the shoes of a raincoated man in that narrative is a self-administered Heimlich
charming paintings of pale, charismatically blend into the patterned tiles he’s standing manoeuvre, to dislodge a pitted olive, and
awkward thirtysomethings (and one or two on. The dive-bar four-piece of Der Trunkene an egg is swallowed by one character only to
paunchy older men); all vaguely bohemian im Frühling (Drunkards in Spring) play their 1980s be regurgitated by another. Something needs
in their demeanour and dress, with question- indie rock in a swirling, slathered maelstrom to be released from a throat. On the plinth
ing stares and knowing smiles playing about of black paint. Naturalistic modelling deterio- of the sculpture an inscription from Heck’s
their lips. They exist in a faintly Northern rates into a flat, sketched-in area in the leg of Babydetektivclub manifesto: ‘To hell with all
European subcultural ambiance – drinking the scarlet-dressed woman in Von Der Schönheit definitive ideologies! The shy, yes almost
in an old bar, performing in a rock band – (Of Beauty), as she gazes with anticipation, shameful ignorance is my hot spring, my
or, more bucolically, sitting by lakesides perhaps, towards some out-of-frame hand- deception. The sensical and the non-sensical,’
among the reeds, contemplating beauty some youth: ‘Her proud pose is but a pretence; it starts. Heck implicates passion, feeling,
and the pathos of existence, maybe. in the flash of her big eyes, in the darkness friendship, intoxication, without setting
But their status as subjects is precarious, of her ardent gaze beats longingly her burning these against self-consciousness, reflection
subjected to Heck’s quizzical meddling heart’, read Mahler’s lines, a century back. or knowledge of history. Painting, poetry,
in how they’re painted. Heck’s painting has The word ‘bingo’ appears in two paintings, music, singing – it’s living-as-an-artist-as-
been known to draw on the history of classical like some involuntary reflex. gesamtkunstwerk. J.J. Charlesworth

Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrow), 2017, oil and colour pencil on canvas,
artist frame, 250 × 350 cm. Photo: Robert Glowacki. © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ , London

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